Jira entered an existing market. Jira entered the existing bug tracking tool market presenting itself with flexibility for all team members and allowance of complexity when it comes to product management. Since it entered the market with competitors such as Bugzilla and internal company tools, it is playing in a red ocean. They believed that PMs prioritized configurability and scale.
Linear resized the market they entered. With issue tracking, tools like Jira, already existed when Linear was created. The way that they resegmented the market was by focusing on a niche audience that would use their product, software teams with ai workflows. Linear removed some of the more complex features from their competitor tools and simplified the issue tracking so that software teams are able to work faster while still having an accurate idea of where their project stands. I would say that Linear is playing in a red ocean that has a patch of blue (blue being niche users that were not prioritized before).
Different from the other two, Productboard entered a newer market type. While the other two platforms rely on some of the initial product planning work to be done outside (iterating to land on spec, taking into account current product standing, slicing the spec into small digestible issues), Productboard helps from the first step. Their scope is a bit wider than just issue tracking, it includes collaborative planning among team members before issues are decided. Productboard is playing in a blue ocean, they had to believe that PMs needed assistance when it came to understanding all of the context of a project before starting to make an execution plan.
Sources:
https://www.productboard.com/use-cases/product-roadmapping/
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
